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Tomorrow is No Email Day: Ignore your inbox and do something more useful instead

Looking at your ever-growing inbox and looking for a reason to ignore it? Tomorrow you have that excuse, as it will be the second annual No Email Day.

A year ago, UK-based Paul Lancaster declared a No Email Day and managed to get coverage for it everywhere from The Next Web to the Wall Street Journal. It’s easy to see why, too. Honestly, does anyone like email? I can’t remember the last time I didn’t view my inbox as a chore.

So what do you do on No Email Day? Simple – ignore your email. Don’t look at your inbox at all and see what else you can achieve. As Lancaster wrote in his original manifesto last year (embedded below), “If you do need to contact someone on this day, emails should be strictly off limits – replaced instead by real life, face-to-face interaction, picking up the phone or perhaps even writing a letter (remember those) Better still, if you can spend time away from work to be inspired and re-connect with the offline world.”

Of course, it might be a bit naive to believe that it’s possible to get by entirely without email, even for a day. Here at The Next Web we’d miss important news tips we need to share with you, and we can hardly walk down the corridor to chat to the entrepreneurs and investors with communicate with every day – they’re based in all sorts of places around the world.

Then of course, once you come back to your email the following day you might have to spend the whole morning catching up with people wondering why you didn’t reply to their urgent missive.

Still, No Email Day is a useful reminder that there’s more to life than your unread messages count. Do you dare ignore your email completely for 24 hours?

Martin Bryant was Editor-at-Large at The Next Web. He left the company in April 2016 for pastures new. You can find him on Twitter, on Snapchat as Martinsfp, subscribe to him on Facebook and visit his personal site. He's based in Manchester, UK and has a thing for quirky American music and Japanese video games.